On this day: Dante Gabriel Rossetti is born

Dante Gabriel Rossetti | Lady Lilith, 1867 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Writer and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born May 12, 1828 in London. Disenchanted with the formula-driven painting being produced by the Royal Academy, Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The Brotherhood embraced l’art pour l’art—art for art’s sake—and aimed to reform the art of their day by emulating the art of late medieval and early Renaissance Europe until the time of Raphael.

This gouache of Lady Lilith comes to us from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and carries an inscription in the back that reads “”Beware of her hair, for she excells (sic) / All women in the magic of her locks / And when she twines them round a young man’s neck / she will not ever set him free again” from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s never-completed translation of Goethe’s Faust. Search for Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the ARTstor Digital Library to find dozens of more works by the highly-influential artist.

On this day: The birth of Howard Carter, discoverer of Tutankhamun’s tomb

Funerary Mask of Tutankhamun, 1333-1323 BCE | Tomb of Tutankhamun, Valley of the Kings, Thebes| Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt | Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com scalarchives.com

On May 9, 1874, future archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter was born in London, England. Carter would find fame in 1922 upon discovering the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings. Search the ARTstor Digital Library for Tutankhamun to find images of many of the breath-taking treasures found in the tomb, including this funerary mask from Italian and other European Art (Scala Archives). Don’t miss H. Parkinson’s drawing of the contents of the tomb, from Plans of Ancient and Medieval Buildings and Archaeological Sites (Bryn Mawr College). When you’re done, check out Wikipedia’s eerie entry on the so-called “curse of the pharaohs.”

[Note: this post erroneously said today was the anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb; it has now been corrected.]

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Gerard Terborch | Man Reading Letter , c. 1680 | Image and data from the Detroit Institute of Arts

Meet ARTstor staff at upcoming conferences

American Association of Museums Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo™
April 29—May 2, 2012
Minneapolis Convention Center, Minneapolis–Saint Paul, MN
ARTstor Chief Curatorial Officer and Vice President for External Affairs Christine Kuan will be a presenter for the panel “Got Images? How to License, Distribute and Leverage Collection Media in the Age of Instant Information” on May 2, 9:00 – 10:15 AM at the Convention Center, Room 101 GH.

Please see the AAM website for additional details.

ARLIS UK/Ireland Annual Conference
June 27-29, 2012
Bloomsbury, London, UK
ARTstor Collection Development Associate Ian McDermott will be attending the 38th annual ARLIS UK/Ireland conference.

For more details about the conference, visit the ARLIS UK/Ireland website.

On this day: May Day

William Glackens | May Day, Central Park, circa 1905 | Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco | Image and data from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

May 1^st, or May Day, celebrates the beginning of summer. The tradition has been manifested throughout different eras and cultures as the Roman festival of Flora, the Germanic Walpurgisnacht festival, and the Gaelic Beltane. It is also International Workers’ Day, in commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago.

This painting of May Day in Central Park by William Glackens comes to us from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Collection, and unfortunately appears as wishful thinking, as New York City greeted the day with rain showers this morning.

Celebrate Mother’s Day with ARTstor

Edward S. Curtis | Assiniboin Mother And Child, 1896-1926 | George Eastman House, eastmanhouse.org

Happy Mother’s Day! The holiday is celebrated in May in dozens of countries around the world. In honor of mothers everywhere, we have assembled some favorite mother and child images from the ARTstor Digital Library spanning a wide variety of cultures and eras.

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Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month

Harry Clifford Fassett | Woman standing in front of thatched hut belonging to Johnnie Toga, a chief, Neifau village, Vavau Island, Tonga Islands, 1899-1900 | Image and data from National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

May is the month to celebrate the heritage of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. The cultures, history, religion, architecture, and art of the continent of Asia are well represented in the ARTstor Digital Library, and you can find a full guide in our ARTstor Is… Asian Studies post; resources for Asian-Pacific content are also plentiful, but scattered throughout many collections and require a little more diligence.

Vanuatu; Malakula Island, Mbotgote | Helmet Mask, 19th-20th century | Image and data from: The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A quick way to find content in the Digital Library from a specific country is by going to the Browse area in the lower left corner of the search page and clicking Geography. Considering that Asia-Pacific encompasses the Pacific islands of Melanesia (Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu), Micronesia (Guam, Kiribati, Marianas, Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Wake Island), and Polynesia (American Samoa and Samoa, Cook Islands, Easter Island, French Polynesia, Hawaiian Islands, Midway Island, New Zealand, Rotumas, Tonga, and Tuvalu), this might be a little time consuming, so here are some hints:

The main repositories of Asian-Pacific images in ARTstor include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which features art and artifacts from many of the regions listed above, the Peabody Museum of Natural History (Yale University), which has archaeological and ethnographic objects, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Harvard University), which has anthropological objects, and Magnum Photos, which includes contemporary photographs of New Guinea by Burt Glinn and Philip Jones Griffiths, of the Marshall Islands by Chris Steele-Perkins, Samoa by Alex Webb, the Cook Islands by Trent Parke, and Easter Island by Thomas Hoepker.

Solomon Islands | Kundu players at Mapiri for dukduk dance | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History

Also of note is Cook’s Voyages to the South Seas (Natural History Museum, London), which includes 1,600 images of botanical and zoological illustrations associated with Captain James Cook’s expeditions to the South Pacific in the 18^th century, and Thomas K. Seligman: Photographs of Liberia, New Guinea, Melanesia and the Tuareg people which, as its title states, includes field photography of New Guinea and Melanesia. Also fruitful, The Native American Art and Culture (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution) includes a dozen fascinating photographs of Fiji in 1900 by Charles Haskins Townsend, and the Fowler Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art Collection, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Smith College Museum of Artall include art and artifacts from different cultures in Asia Pacific.

Johann Georg Adam Forster | Rufous Night Heron, 1774 | Image and original data provided by Natural History Museum, London

And don’t miss Teaching with ARTstor: Re-historicizing Contemporary Pacific Island Art by Marion Cadora, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Enjoy the celebrations and don’t forget to visit the Library of Congress’ official Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month site!

Polynesian | Easter Island (Rapa Nui); view of unfinished moai statues on slopes of Rano Raraku volcano | 10th-12th cent. | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com / artres.com